Primary

All children deserve the chance to grow up in a loving, secure family. They could have the chance to fulfil their potential if society reduced levels of educational failure, ill health, substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, abuse and neglect, crime and anti-social behaviour among children and young people1. The Report “Every Child Matters”2 was stimulated […]

Teaching, like good parenting, is a demanding task for it is part intuition, and part expertise. It’s extremely hard to know when you’ve got it right. Parents and teachers delight in seeing the results of their labours, but often the most precious fruits of their work are those they may never actually see1. Politicians […]

Children grow, both physically and mentally, at different rates; many a child rated as bright or dull has confounded the experts not only in later life but even within a few years, or even months. What all children need is to have their intellectual curiosity so fired up that they will go on learning long […]

In a country lacking any sense of internal social cohesion, the introduction of new national education policies, designed to promote efficiency and to settle many old scores, may well create as many new problems for future generations as the old problems it sought to legislate out of existence. As Queen Victoria lay dying it […]

The Rich and the Poor in mid-nineteenth century England were as two separate nations. Each was as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different continents, or inhabitants of different planets; formed by different breeding and not even governed by the same laws.1 It was Benjamin Disraeli2 […]

What a person achieves through their own efforts they most value. Where individuals, through the nature of the economic system in which they live, cannot earn sufficient to provide for the proper education of their own children, then the future well-being of that society, as well as that of their children in particular, will be […]

Whether education is primarily for personal gain, or for the benefit of the whole society, is a question to which the English invariably give ambiguous answers. Our attitudes towards matters educational were, and continued to be in the early twenty-first century, rooted in our social assumptions. By the late 1860s England seemed full of […]

“Anyone who will look before him must see the growing political importance of the mass of the population. They will have power. In a very short time they will be paramount. I wish them to be enlightened, in order that they may use that power which they will inevitably obtain.”1 Until 1833 the […]

Foundations of Intelligence Queen Victoria created a most dangerous myth when she told the English that “little children should be seen and not heard”. That myth lives on today in school budgets which allocate more money to older children than younger children so resulting in larger classes for the youngest, and smaller classes in the […]